Have you been experiencing declines in your recent sales? Or are you stuck with ineffective marketing techniques—and you feel like your pool of clients is not growing as needed and expected? Perhaps there are some aspects of your business that require improvement. Although not all businesses are susceptible to losing clients, those that fail to spot their mistakes early on are on the verge of losing their business in the long run.
Before such an incident arises, now’s the time to check and reflect on which areas of your business require changes. Focusing on customer experience plays a big part in increasing customer retention.
So, check out these common business mistakes that increase the risk of losing customers:
1. Failure To Follow Up
A retention marketing guide will help you nurture customer relationships, along with communicating and following up with your customers and clients consistently. After a closed sale, don’t simply stop there. If you don’t give them the chance to voice their opinions, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn what could be improved in your business.
Monitoring expectations, the quality of service, the efficiency of staff, and other crucial areas will allow your business to grow from past mistakes. Thus, soliciting feedback and communicating with the customers can be advantageous for the company.
2. Bad Packaging
Although packing orders quickly is important for prompt shipping and delivery, sloppily done packaging may get you in trouble. Imagine being the recipient of a poorly packed order. You’d feel very disappointed and most probably won’t be reordering anytime soon. You could also lose valuable products in transit if you use flimsy and low-quality packaging materials.
Always put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When you’re packing fragile items, ensure that they’ll make it safely to the recipient.
Additionally, minimize waste when packing your products. With environmentally friendly packaging options available in the market today, your prospects and customers will appreciate your initiative to go green and help save the environment through sustainable practices.
3. Overwhelming Customers Through Over-communication
Let’s face it—other people are not as interested in the specifics of your business as you are. Therefore, it’s important not to overwhelm customers, but still keep them engaged. It’s important to find a balance between these two. Keeping your customers engaged means providing them with adequate information without being too over-persuasive.
The worst thing that might happen when your clients are fed up with over-communication is that they’ll permanently tune you out or unsubscribe from your emails. Your relationship with prospects could be weakened either way.
How will you make sure your communication efforts aren’t overwhelming but remain engaging? Following the industry’s threshold metrics is a good place to start. You can go for two emails or two customer reach-outs weekly, which is an acceptable number for any customer. Then, evaluate response rates to determine the best email practices for a certain group of customers. Since buyers have different preferences, you should have different approaches for various groups.
4. Generic Branding
Generic branding always fails to sustain brands in the long run. Bombarding your campaigns with promises of being the cheapest or highest-quality brand will not take you places. Essentially, this just confuses prospects or gives them the impression that you’re also unsure of your own brand.
A successful brand is a unique and distinguishable one, with realistic and specific goals that they can truly fulfill. You can achieve this by studying your competitors and highlighting your strengths. From this point, you can create a unique brand and make it stand out.
5. Failure To Take Accountability
Despite your efforts, at some point, your business will eventually make errors. No business operations are exempted from committing such errors, whether human or machine-generated. In general, customers are willing to forgive employees who commit honest mistakes, but you also have to formulate an approach to make it up to them.
Your company should admit even the smallest mistakes and go out of its way to make up for them. You can retain customers through an apology, gift, or reward. This is equivalent to taking accountability and your customers will appreciate the gesture.
6. Promising But Failing To Deliver
One of the most difficult parts of dealing with customers is telling them honestly that their requests can’t be met, or that you can’t deliver what is due to them, whether a product or a service. Their reactions are quite expected afterward. While it can be difficult to face an angry customer, it’s always better to be honest than to come up with lies and fail to meet their expectations. This will further disappoint them, leaving your relationship with them irreparable.
Therefore, as much as you hate to disappoint, it’s always better to speak the truth than to promise and fail to deliver accordingly.
7. Inaccessible Website
People now access the Internet more often through mobile devices than through desktop computers. Therefore, when you consider building a website, it’s ideal to make sure that it’s easily accessible on mobile devices too. When your site is too complex to navigate from a smartphone, you’ll most likely lose some customers. A responsive design will allow your site to adapt automatically to any screen size for optimal display.
8. Slow Or Late Shipment
Ecommerce businesses frequently encounter complaints from customers about shipping. People are always excited to receive their shipment but when there are delays, their excitement easily dissipates.
As shipping speeds increase, customer demands also increase. Due to competition and saturation in the market, some logistics services now offer faster modes of shipping. For your business to keep up with the competitive market, try to partner with a reliable logistics company.
Conclusion
Maintaining customer loyalty and increasing profit can be easily achieved when these costly mistakes are avoided. Customer retention is vital for any business, and these mistakes can drive them away quickly. If you want repeat customers and patrons for your business, you have to exert more effort in keeping them satisfied through the best business practices.
Charlie Herrera
Charlie Herrera is an entrepreneur who owns small businesses for over 20 years now. He shares his experience and knowledge through seminars, guest posting, and blogging. During his free time, he likes to read books about the economy and business.
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